This invention relates to a method and apparatus for stripping blanks, such as plant identification tags, from sheets containing many such tags that are partially separated by die cutting and in particular to such a method and apparatus for stripping bundles of such blanks or tags from a stack of such sheets and tying each bundle.
Plant identification tags, or other like planar articles, are typically manufactured by die cutting sheets of material into individual blanks connected by bridges. After the die cutting operation, the blanks remain mutually attached in sheets by the bridges to facilitate removal of the blanks from the die cut press. In order to separate the blanks from adjacent blanks, the sheets are conventionally stacked in quantities of as much as one hundred or more sheets and bundles of blanks are removed from the stack of sheets by applying a force perpendicular to the plane of the sheets to the location of the cut line.
Such conventional method and apparatus for stripping tags have many difficulties. The very large stripping thrust requires strong, and hence massive, components operated at relatively high pneumatic or hydraulic pressures. The resulting equipment is bulky yet subject to excessive wear notwithstanding such bulk. Modern safety standards require that such equipment be shielded from entanglement by human limbs. However, the stripping equipment is prone to malfunctioning due to disassociation of the bundle of tags, which interface with low-friction surfaces. The disassociation disables the equipment and requires human intervention to remove the jam. The presence of the safety shields and the large profile of the equipment result in extensive downtime to clear each jam. The net result is that productivity from such conventional stripping equipment is unacceptably low and maintenance costs unacceptably high.